24 Years of Hunger is a pop music

Pop music

Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...

 album released in 1991 by Eg & Alice, the collaboration of Eg White

Eg White

Francis Anthony "Eg" White is a British musician, songwriter and producer. White is primarily known for his work with successful commercial pop acts such as Adele, Duffy, Will Young and James Morrison...

 and Alice Temple

Alice Temple

Alice Temple is an English musician, singer and songwriter, born in London. She is best known for her collaboration with Eg White under the name Eg and Alice. She is also notable for having been the first female UK and European BMX champion.-BMX:...

. 24 Years of Hunger was critically acclaimed, although it failed to chart. It is the only album that the duo ever released.

Allmusic describes 24 Years of Hunger as "one of the finest, most refined and fully realized recordings of the era, employing a much more sophisticated and romantic style than anything else out of England at the time".

Allmusic also notes the accolades that 24 Years of Hunger album received from other music critics:

"Recorded by the pair when they were mere twentysomethings, and predominantly in Eg White's home, it is nevertheless about as grown-up and elegant as pop music gets. A decade after the recording had all but vanished from circulation, rainsound.net had taken to calling it "one of the classic albums of the '90s," while Q Magazine went a step further when it placed the record on its list of best albums of the 20th century, describing it as having "the class of Steely Dan

Steely Dan

Steely Dan is an American rock band; its core members are Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. The band's popularity peaked in the late 1970s, with the release of seven albums blending elements of jazz, rock, funk, R&B, and pop...

 and the intriguing detachment of the Blue Nile

Blue Nile

The Blue Nile is a river originating at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. With the White Nile, the river is one of the two major tributaries of the Nile...

." "

Martin Rowsell, in The Rough Guide to Rock, notes that while reviewers compared the album to Prefab Sprout

Prefab Sprout

Prefab Sprout are an alternative English pop rock band from Witton Gilbert, County Durham, England who rose to fame during the 1980s. Eight of their albums have reached the Top 40 in the UK Albums Chart, and one of their singles, "The King of Rock 'n' Roll", peaked at number seven in the UK...

 and Prince

Prince (musician)

Prince Rogers Nelson , often known simply as Prince, is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Prince has produced ten platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles during his career. Prince founded his own recording studio and label; writing, self-producing and playing most, or all, of...

, Eg and Alice cited their own musical influences as John Lennon

John Lennon

John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...

, Traveling Wilburys

Traveling Wilburys

The Traveling Wilburys were an English–American supergroup consisting of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty, accompanied by drummer Jim Keltner...

, Joe Jackson

Joe Jackson (musician)

Joe Jackson is an English musician and singer-songwriter now living in Berlin, whose five Grammy Award nominations span from 1979 to 2001...

, Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...

 and Curtis Mayfield

Curtis Mayfield

Curtis Lee Mayfield was an American soul, R&B, and funk singer, songwriter, and record producer.He is best known for his anthemic music with The Impressions during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's and for composing the soundtrack to the blaxploitation film Super Fly, Mayfield is highly...

. Noting the huge discrepancy between the album's critical and commercial success, Rowsell speculates that White's songwriting may have been too personal for mainstream acceptance at the time.

Track listing

1. Rockets
2. In A Cold Way
3. Mystery Man
4. And I Have Seen Myself
5. So High, So Low
6. New Year's Eve
7. Indian
8. Doesn't Mean That Much To Me
9. Crosstown
10. IOU
11. I Wish